Hide Gridlines In Excel
The gridlines in an Excel spreadsheet are only visible when looking at the worksheet electronically, and are not displayed when you send a worksheet to a printer.
However, sometimes you might want to hide gridlines in an Excel worksheet when it is viewed on a computer screen. Two different ways of doing this are described below.
Hide Gridlines by De-Selecting the Gridlines Option
The visibility of the gridlines in an Excel worksheet is controlled by the Gridlines option, which is switched on by default.
Therefore, if you want to hide the gridlines in Excel, you simply need to deselect the option, which can be found as follows:
In Current Versions of Excel (2007 and later):
- The Gridlines option is found within the 'Show' grouping, in the View tab of the Excel ribbon (see rightabove).
In Excel 2003:
- Select Tools→Options... to open up the Options dialog box.
- The Gridlines option is located in the View tab of the Options dialog box (see rightabove).
Hide Gridlines by Filling Cells With a Background Color
A second way to hide gridlines in Excel is to color the cell backgrounds in white. This method can be used to hide the gridlines in a chosen range of cells, or for an entire worksheet.
To color the cell background:
- Select the cells that you want to hide the gridlines on;
-
Click the down arrow at the side of the Fill Color button
This gives you a selection of colors that you can use to fill the background of the selected cells (see above right). If you select white as the fill color, this will give the appearance of simply removing the gridlines in the selected cells of your worksheet.
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which is located on the 'Home' tab of the Excel ribbon (or on the formatting toolbar in Excel 2003).